4 years after his death, Tony Hsieh’s properties sell for millions, attract vagrants
Tech mogul Tony Hsieh, who died nearly four years ago, was one of the biggest property owners in downtown Las Vegas.
Since his death on Nov. 27, 2020, his estate sold more than $45 million worth of properties he assembled — but many others he owned have yet to trade hands. And in some cases, their blighted condition drew a nuisance notice from the city.
Hsieh, the former CEO of online shoe seller Zappos and the face of downtown’s economic revival, died at age 46 from injuries suffered in a Connecticut house fire. He did not leave a will, and his family has sold a dozen properties in Las Vegas through his probate case for roughly $46.9 million combined, according to court filings and property records.
Buyers have picked up retail and office space, parking lots, a residential compound and a school campus. Hsieh, however, owned dozens of other parcels in the downtown area that had not been sold as of early November, including apartment complexes, commercial buildings and shuttered motel sites, the Las Vegas Review-Journal found.
All told, the sales are part of the drawn-out effort to handle Hsieh’s estate — a task that has featured legal battles with his friends and associates and court filings with detailed accounts of Hsieh’s drug use and erratic behavior in his final year alive.
‘Hazard to children’
Hsieh’s real estate portfolio included vacant buildings and empty lots, and since his death, Las Vegas city officials have issued nuisance notices about several of his former properties.
The city ordered that “offensive odors” be removed from one site and, at others, to haul off waste, secure access points and not allow homeless people to move in, county records show.
The notice about foul odors has since been satisfied and released by the city. The building in question was demolished, and at least two other properties that drew notices have also been torn down.
One property that’s still standing — a boarded-up, fenced-off motel at the corner of Fremont and 14th streets — is a “hazard to children in the area, harbors vagrant activity, and presents a health and safety issue” for the neighborhood, the city wrote in a notice in August.
Hsieh’s father, Richard Hsieh, is the administrator of his son’s estate. Attorneys for the elder Hsieh did not respond to requests for comment.
Heavy investment
Hsieh grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and sold an online marketing firm to Microsoft Corp. for $265 million in stock in 1998. He was an early investor in Zappos, which moved from San Francisco to Henderson in 2004 and was acquired by Amazon in 2009 in a $1 billion-plus deal.
After the buyout, Hsieh remained at the helm of Zappos and became a one-man redevelopment engine for a once-neglected stretch of downtown Las Vegas. He moved Zappos from a Henderson office park to the former Las Vegas City Hall in 2013 and invested heavily in the Fremont Street area through a $350 million side venture originally called Downtown Project.
He bankrolled bars, eateries and tech startups and purchased apartment complexes, office buildings, motel properties and other sites through the venture, now called DTP Companies.
Hsieh lived downtown in an Airstream trailer with a pet alpaca, had a fondness for Northern Nevada’s Burning Man festival and sported a mohawk. But after the pandemic abruptly ended his interactions and good times in Las Vegas, he emerged in the ski town of Park City, Utah, buying several houses there in 2020.
He was replaced as CEO of Zappos in the summer of 2020 without a formal announcement from the company that he had led for two decades. He died months later.
Selling Vegas
As part of his probate case, his family filed more than 100 sale notices in court in a two-day span in early 2021 for his Las Vegas real estate holdings.
His estate hired brokerage firm Logic Commercial Real Estate last year to sell several properties that Hsieh owned. Boston Omaha Asset Management went on to acquire some of those sites for almost $25 million combined, the Review-Journal reported in February.
Logic co-founder Brendan Keating was named a co-managing partner of Boston Omaha just four months before Logic announced the listings.
Mike Mixer, chairman of commercial real estate brokerage Colliers International’s Las Vegas office, previously said that it can be a slippery slope when brokers acquire real estate they were hired to sell, given the appearance that they are competing with buyers.
Boston Omaha’s parent company said in March that it was winding down operations of its asset-management arm, and it said in May that Keating would provide management services for this task.
Keating and Boston Omaha Corp. did not respond to a request for comment on how, or if, the winddown would affect their ownership of Hsieh’s former properties.
Hsieh’s estate also hired brokerage firm Avison Young to sell several other properties in its portfolio.
The real estate company announced on Friday that it sold four of the listings for more than $8 million combined, including a vacant restaurant building, retail space and an empty office building.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342.